Diaspora Jews learned to be helpless — and that must end.

Two millennia of powerlessness still shapes the Jewish mind. But Diaspora Jews have power, and it’s time to use it.

artwork by Future of Jewish

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This is a guest essay by Benjamin Kerstein, adapted from the new book, “Self Defense: A Jewish Manifesto,” available on Amazon.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Faced with the current eruption of antisemitism, many if not most Diaspora Jews want to fight back. For the moment, however, they do not know how. Anger, defiance, and frustration are prevalent, but they have no satisfactory outlet.

They have no outlet because they have not been provided one. Israelis have an army to fight with, but Diaspora Jews do not.

Diaspora Jewish life is highly organized, with an alphabet soup of groups involved in every aspect of life, including fighting antisemitism. There are combative organizations dedicated to different aspects of the battle, from lawsuits to billboards. But there is currently no organized, nationwide movement dedicated to the cause that is at the true heart of the matter: that of self-defense, including through the legal use of force.

This is not surprising. It is a consequence of a centuries-old dysfunctional culture of Jewish quiescence. For 2,000 years, the Jews were stateless and powerless. They lived at the mercy and sufferance of kings, ministers, and presidents. Everything could be taken from them at any moment and often was.

As a result, the Jews developed a survival strategy based on despair. They believed that their only option in the face of antisemitism was to keep their heads down, refrain from making trouble, and wait for it to pass. Their leaders appealed to those in power for sufferance; they bargained; they made themselves useful. But ultimately the Jews they represented had nothing to do but hope for the best. They embodied a kind of learned helplessness.

A psychological theory developed in the late 1960s, “learned helplessness” describes a phenomenon where an animal or human being believes they have no control over pain or other forms of suffering. No matter what they try to do to stop it, nothing works. They are helpless.

As a result, they stop trying. However, what is highly disturbing is that they continue their apathetic behavior in situations where they can stop the suffering — situations where they are not helpless. The lesson of powerlessness has been so well-learned that it has become unshakable.

In their book “Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control” Christopher Peterson, Steven F. Maier, and Martin E. P. Seligman, who developed the idea, sum up their theory:

“When experience with uncontrollable events leads to the expectation that future events will elude control, disruptions in motivation, emotion, and learning may occur. This phenomenon has been called learned helplessness.”

Peterson, Maier, and Seligman first conceived the idea after observing some rather cruel animal experiments, particularly one involving a dog subjected to electric shocks. Initially, the dog was rendered unable to escape the shocks. Later, when given the means to do so, it refused. According to the authors:

When shock is inescapable, the dog learns that it is unable to exert control over the shock by means of any of its voluntary behaviors. It expects this to be the case in the future, and this expectation of uncontrollability causes it to fail to learn in the future…

We further suggested that the expectancy reduces the dog’s incentive to attempt to escape, thereby producing a deficit in its response initiation. And it also interferes with the actual learning of response-shock termination relationships, thereby producing a cognitive deficit…

Here is the theory of learned helplessness in unvarnished form. It has three components: (1) critical environmental conditions; (2) translation of these conditions into an animal’s expectations; and (3) alteration of the animal’s psychological processes by these expectations.

The Jews, of course, are not laboratory animals, but all human beings are animals and often react in the same way as other animals. In the case of the Jews in exile, the circumstances under which they learned to be helpless are evident and understandable. They lacked the ability to defend themselves and rarely had means of escaping persecution. However, wherever they sought refuge, persecution inevitably followed them.

So, the Jews of the exile learned to be helpless because they were helpless. All they could do was hope they would be left alone. In the end, of course, they were not left alone.

Worse still, both then and now, even when the opportunity to escape the persecution (such as immigration to Israel) or mount a defense does exist, Jews often do not do so. The lesson of centuries has been so deeply ingrained that we are not even aware of it.

Indeed, for a time, the culture of quiescence born of learned helplessness may have worked.

The Jews of the exile endured terrible persecution and countless lives were lost. Yet collectively they managed to survive even as great kingdoms and empires crumbled into oblivion. Keeping their heads down did prevent some of their heads from being chopped off.

Nonetheless, in the end, it didn’t work. The verdict of history was devastating.

The Jews of Europe who kept their heads down ended up as dead as those who did not. The Jews of the Muslim world were ethnically cleansed as soon as their presence became a hindrance to the pan-Arab dream of racial purity and genocidal anti-Zionism. The contributions both communities had made to their host societies, the wealth or status they had built, counted for nothing.

In other words, quiescence ultimately failed to justify its cost. It failed as a survival strategy.

Many Jews, such as Theodor Herzl and other early Zionists, knew this would happen. They foresaw that the Jews would not be left alone. As the juggernaut of modernity continued on, with its uprisings, rebellions, and revolutions, the Jews who dissented from the quiescent consensus began to cultivate other options.

But in practice, these were mostly the Jews of Palestine and then Israel, not the United States. Zionism attracted the dissenters, who were willing to undertake physical hardship and a downgrade in their quality of life in order to embrace the promise of self-determination and self-defense. Most Jews, however, preferred to repeat the patterns of their forebears, who escaped each collapsing Diaspora by searching for opportunity in more promising lands. And nothing was as promising as the United States, the goldene medineh.

The United States, after all, was different. It had relatively low levels of religious bigotry. Even before the civil rights era, America was much more open to Jewish assimilation than Europe had ever been. In the 20th century, the American Jewish culture of quiescence thrived.

But it also led to an unspoken bargain between the Jews and America: The Jews would become as American as they possibly could, and in return they would be left alone.

To hold up its end of the bargain, the American Jewish community adopted an ethos that can be summed up in a single admonition: “Don’t make trouble.”

As a result, any strident action on behalf of Jewish interests, any militancy, became verboten. It would only “make things worse.” Defense organizations of a kind were founded, such as the Anti-Defamation League, but they were always unfailingly polite, content to “work within the system” and cultivate establishment support. This was certainly not a bad thing, but it has never been enough.

Nonetheless, Jews in America thrived for a long time. They built wealth, philanthropy, and immense cultural influence. Today, however, we also see this approach’s terrible consequences. In a Jewish culture dedicated to not making trouble, speaking truth to antisemitism — whether to politicians, professors, celebrities, teenage activists, or non-Jews in general — is considered a dangerous provocation.

Of course, Jewish activism emerged in many oblique forms. Specific organizations were charged with combating antisemitism, mainly through scripted statements of outrage and principally focusing on neo-Nazis and other troublemakers on the extreme right.

More broadly, Jews allied with progressive movements fighting for equality and rights — especially minority, women’s and gay rights — under the belief that through an altruistic demand for tolerance and equality, Jews would be indirectly protected. They built engines of pro-Israel activity, encouraging support for another country based on “shared values” and American interests. Finally, they centralized the Holocaust as an “educational tool” meant to encourage Americans to be “tolerant,” in the hopes that this would somehow prevent the rise of antisemitism in America.

All of these were “bank-shot” strategies, institutional solutions meant to allow ordinary Jews to maintain their culture of quiescence, of never speaking too loudly about, much less fighting for, actual American-Jewish interests — as if doing so explicitly would somehow unleash the Cossacks on their communities.

These measures were not self-defense, whether physical or spiritual. They were, in most cases, replacements for it that appealed to universal values rather than specific Jewish interests. This allowed some Jews to feel they had “done their part,” while avoiding any kind of self-assertion that might trigger the kinds of anger their forebears had faced in other countries. Tellingly, the phrase “Jewish rights” never escaped their lips.

Under these circumstances, self-defense is simply unthinkable. To even consider fighting and striking down the enemy is beyond comprehension.

In the last few years, a great many Diaspora Jews have begun to dissent from this quiescent consensus. But they have not found the means to defeat it. This is tragic, because it has become obvious that quiescence, even if it worked for a time, is now obsolete. We can no longer pretend there is no danger to the Diaspora Jewish future.

More importantly, we no longer reside in the era of Jewish powerlessness. Today, a sovereign Jewish state has been reconstituted. Despite facing opposition and hatred from many, it stands strong, prosperous, respected, and on the rise, defying the relentless efforts of its adversaries. At the same time, Jewish communities in the Diaspora have become well-established and powerful groups — as reluctant as they may be to use that power. While this power may not be as potent as the derangements of antisemitism would have it, Diaspora Jews are far from helpless. They possess enormous human and material resources.

In such circumstances, quiescence is not only unnecessary but also counterproductive. We must never be the dog who can escape the shocks but chooses not to.

Consequently, the Diaspora Jewish community is now, as George Orwell once wrote of wartime England, engaged in “a struggle between the groping and the unteachable, between the young and the old, between the living and the dead.”

Diaspora Jews must choose to be among the living.

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